Testing Smarter with Angie Jones

This interview with Angie Jones is part of the Hexawise “Testing Smarter with…” software testing interview series. Our goal with these interviews is to highlight insights and experiences as told by many of the software testing field’s leading thinkers.

Angie Jones is a Senior Software Engineer in Test at Twitter who has developed automation strategies and frameworks for countless software products. Angie shares her wealth of knowledge by speaking and teaching at software conferences all over the world and leading tech workshops for young girls through Black Girls Code.

Read the full interview here: Testing Smarter with Angie Jones

Excerpts from the interview:

Hexawise: Wow! You’re everywhere. Conference presentations around the globe at a break-neck pace. How’d that happen, exactly?

Angie: Ha ha. I’ve been doing test automation for quite some time. In early 2016, I attended a testing conference and didn’t learn much of anything new. It wasn’t a knock on the conference, but it was a wake up call for me.

I also interviewed people for automation roles quite often and found it was extremely hard to find people that were on the same level as my team. I realized that I have something to contribute and should be working to advance the industry in any small way that I can.

Diversity is also something that’s extremely important to me, so I thought being a black female on the stages of white male dominated conferences could also be my way of shaking up the game a little bit.

Actually, seeing a black woman announced as a speaker at a tech conference on Twitter was something that stopped me in my tracks. It wasn’t something I’d seen before. The conference was Write/Speak/Code, an event that empowers women to become thought leaders by writing blogs, speaking at conferences, and contributing to open source software! It was exactly what I needed. I attended and it absolutely changed my life. In less than 6 months after that conference, I’d become an international speaker and was being invited to keynote across the world. It all happened so fast...it was crazy!

Hexawise: You have helped Black Girls Code and TechGirlz work to provide girls the opportunity to learn to code. Do those efforts leave you with hope that the future is in good hands?

Angie: You know, I set out to inspire young girls, but every time I work with them I’m the one who leaves totally inspired and renewed. The girls are so smart and innovative! I give them a little push and they end up creating things that totally blow me away. The idea is to plant the seed. I wasn’t exposed to technology much as a young girl and had no idea that computer programming was even a career option. I almost missed my calling because of that. I don’t want our industry to miss out the next Tech Rock Star because she didn’t know about us.

Hexawise: Your article BDD Without the Three Amigos: Maybe Talking To Yourself Isn't So Bad is really thought provoking. In it, you acknowledge that Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) “done right” includes the 3 amigos, but you go on to explore what happens in situations when BA’s and Developers aren’t wiling to “play ball”. You suggest that you have seen testers gain significant value on their own by using BDD. Testers, for example, can create Gherkin feature files with clear “Given / When / Then” instructions that enable rapid creation of executable test scripts.

Angie: Yeah, we often make these hard fast rules and try to force everyone to follow them. Whenever someone “misuses” a practice, all hell breaks loose on the internet. I’ve consulted with a lot of teams and came to realize that these teams are not naive. They realize that they are using the approach differently than it was intended to be used. However, they’ve made it work for them. The greatest businesses are ones that observe how their customers are misusing their products/services and adapt accordingly to make it easier for them to do what it is that they want to do, and still gain the benefit of the product/service. To that point, Matt Wynne, co-founder of Cucumber BDD, actually read this piece and realized that there was more he could do in the industry to push for collaboration from the other amigos.

Read the full interview here: Testing Smarter with Angie Jones

Read previous interviews: 

1. Testing Smarter with Matt Heusser
2. Testing Smarter at StarEAST
3. Testing Smarter with Ajay Balamurugadas
4. Testing Smarter with Hans Buwalda
5. Testing Smarter with Rikard Edgren
6. Testing Smarter with Michael Bolton
7. Testing Smarter with Mike Bland
8. Testing Smarter with Alan Page
9. Testing Smarter with Dorothy Graham
10. Testing Smarter with James Bach